Clare, Michigan, is known for several odd phenomena, and thanks to a recent eyewitness report, I’m about to add a third.

Set very near the center of Michigan’s lower peninsula, Clare became the site of a string of UFO sightings in the late 60s and early 70s when strange lights were seen along Herrick Road. There have been UFO sightings about 14 miles south in Mount Pleasant, as well.

It was in those same decades when area was also known as home of the Clare Deer Man. Most witnesses described that creature as fairly human from the torso up, including a human-like head, with eyes that were between animal and human. Its lower body, however, featured the legs and hooves of a deer or goat. It sounded like a satyr; something torn from the ancient legends of Pan.

In 2005, however, a young woman driving home at night from her job at a nearby golf course at about 11:45 pm on Sunday, August 28, saw something entirely different. The weather was clear and warm, although Tropical Storm Katrina was at that time pounding the nation’s southernmost states. As she tooled along in her 1996 Dodge Intrepid, she was sober and alert to her surroundings. She wrote:

I had just turned onto Eberhart Rd. which is a dirt road from Beaverton Rd. I was traveling south on Eberhart, and going slow as I had just turned the corner, when I spotted the creature on the right hand side of the road, under a yard light that someone had placed at the end of their driveway.

At first I was unable to tell what it was, only that it was large and seemed out of place. In that area of the world we have many deer, and raccoons, rabbits, and the occasional coyote, wolf, mountain lion or bear. But even from a distance and with it hunched over, I could tell this was out of the ordinary.

I slowed my car to a stop as I approached the creature, at this point I still had not seen its face as it was hunched over eating the garbage that had been placed by the side of the road for pick up the following morning. The visibility was good, as the home had installed a yard light, at the junction of the road and their driveway, and the garbage and the creature were directly under it.

The first thing I noticed about the creature was that the fur was very short, like a horse’s or a greyhound’s, and shiny. The second thing I noticed was that it was in an odd position as it appeared to be hunched down with its arms and face low to the ground, as it was eating garbage, and it had shoulders like a man. It was jet black, and very and I cannot stress this enough, very heavily muscled, as it ate I could see the muscles in its shoulders and arms moving under the skin. It was larger than a man, perhaps the size of a bear when hunched over. If I had to guess, when fully standing, I would assume it to be over seven feet tall.

At this point my mind was going a million miles an hour trying to identify this creature, the fur and shape was like nothing I had ever seen. Then it looked up, and I still get goose bumps to this day when I remember that face. Its face was horrible, I mean really horrible. The eyes were red, like a sort of red that appeared to give off its own luminescence, this could be incorrect and it could have been that they were just incredibly reflective from the yard light, but he was looking at me, not up, so it was very odd to me that they should glow like that.

The teeth were the most predominate feature, they looked so unreal that I stared until it moved trying to convince myself that I was seeing it wrong and there was a logical explanation. The face was shorter than most werewolf or dog man images, and the teeth were so large that it seemed impossible that such a thing could exist. It was hideous, and so terrifying. It had ears like a doberman but they curled in slightly, and it was sitting back on its heals, and it was built like a man from the chest up, shoulders and all. Then it made a lunge of sorts towards the car, the last thing I saw before flooring it out of there, was the face twisting into a snarl and that it was coming towards me.

I have spent years trying to fathom how anything with teeth like that could possibly be a living thing, they just seem like they would get in the way, if that makes any sense. I have also spent years trying to convince myself that his teeth appeared metal due to the reflection of the lights, but Linda, and I could be wrong, but it looked like his teeth shone like metal.

I literally floored my car, and it fish tailed on the gravel and I nearly lost control. I was so frightened, all I could think of was to get out of there and get out of there fast. I was living a couple of country blocks down the road at that time, and was so scared that I pulled my car up to the door and ran inside and locked the doors. I haven’t seen it since, and outside of seeing a pair of ghostly legs crawl behind a chair while living in a haunted house, several years after seeing the dogman, I have never seen anything else that couldn’t be logically explained.

When I told her about the UFO and deer man reports, she said she had never heard about them although she grew up only a block from Herrick Road. But they made a sort of strange sense to her. She replied,

I grew up with an intense fear of UFOs so intense that even as an adult I never felt safe in the area, yet oddly enough as soon as I moved, it was simply gone. Even as an adult, I could not sleep in the dark, and I would have these awful nightmares about getting sucked out my window, or being lined up in the back yard at night with the neighbors, no one being able to move or speak. *shudder* I left and moved to central NY in 2011 and have had no fear since.

Clare is also located about 20 miles east of Evart, known for glowing cemetery lights, and about 32 miles from Reed City, where several dogman sightings have taken place. The Manistee National Forest lies just westward of that town.

As I told the witness, what she saw didn’t resemble the majority of dogman reports I receive in regard to its huge, muscular shoulders–canines don’t have shoulders–its sleek, shiny black fur, and of course the horrific face and giant, metallic teeth. I believe dogmen with this description usually have some association with other unknown phenomena such as lights, UFOs and other strange creatures, and Clare certainly fills that bill.

These, black-furred, super-muscled monsters are not unique to Michigan but are reported from all over the world. In fact, I have another new report of a similar creature seen near Houston Texas. Watch for it here soon!

Last night on Sanjay Singhal’s Beyond the Forest radio show (archived podcast now up) I discussed an update to the Wisconsin Goat Man story published just previously here. The drawing in the post below was my original forensic sketch based on what the witness described, but at the time it was posted I didn’t yet have the witness’ confirmation as to the accuracy of the sketch. That came yesterday in an email. He said, “We saw that thing,” and characterized my drawing as very accurate.

Yikes!

And by the way, that radio show was one of the most fun programs I’ve done. The first 25 minutes were devoted to Sanjay’s tribute of his late friend, Joshua, who first got him started in blogging and radio, but after that we discussed everything from Sanjay’s and my UFO encounter last August while staking out a dogman site with a property owner, our own thoughts on Bigfoot awareness of humans in its territory, trail hike safety considerations, spook lights and more. I’ll be doing another show with my good friend and colleague Sanjay on January 26, 8-10 pm Central.

Only a few days before Christmas, 2014, Phantoms and Monsters blogger Lon Strickler included a UFO sighting and close encounter report titled “Still…the Oddest Account I’ve Ever Read.” http://www.phantomsandmonsters.com/2014/12/stillthe-oddest-account-ive-ever-read.html It came from a man named Ken who sent Strickler his late father’s written account of seeing a UFO in Orange County, CA in 1996, just before spotting a bald, alien-looking being dressed in a light blue bodysuit as he was walking a few blocks away from his house.

I almost choked on my eggnog–in a good way–as the story reminded me of a 2006 Wisconsin sighting that also involved a UFO and an alien in a light blue body suit. And it’s a Christmas story, as well.

I visited and interviewed the nationally recognized, visionary artist Ellis Nelson of Muscoda for my book, “Strange Wisconsin,” not long after his sighting. Nelson is a semi-retired, self-taught metal sculptor. His front yard gallery on the edge of Muscoda teems with original versions of the Grim Reaper, various animals, and a stylized version of the UFO he saw fly overhead as he sat outdoors in his lawn chair one day that year.

It was August, and the yellow jackets were swarming. Nelson watched one of them as it spiraled into the sky, hoping to discover the location of its nest, when he noticed a silent, gray disk emerging from a large cloud bank. He watched the strange craft glide across the sky and disappear in another group of clouds.

A few months later, on Christmas day, he was sitting inside his studio next to his home-made, sawdust-burning furnace, when a strange, female humanoid appeared only a little over a foot away. He had been dozing, said Nelson, but her presence jolted him awake. (Some may say this was therefore a dream-state experience but Nelson insists it was not.) Despite his surprise, he sat stock still and studied her carefully. She had white hair arranged in corkscrew curls, large blue eyes lacking pupils or whites but covered by a clear membrane, and she wore a form-fitting, light blue bodysuit accented with a red bowtie. Her mouth was a just a straight slit, she had no visible nose, and her head “bulged in back where it met the neck.” She was staring at his furnace, and he watched her for what he estimated was about 8 seconds.

He was then distracted by the sudden awareness that his drill press was lying on the floor, and when he looked up again, she had vanished. But so certain was Nelson about the reality of his experience that he wrote and signed an affidavit attesting to his truthfulness. He keeps this memento of the Christmas visitor sitting framed on his desk.

The California alien was a bit different than the Wisconsin creature. Its eyes were small and round, and it wore big black boots. But the biggest difference between the two sightings is that the alien Ken’s father saw walked behind a garage, only to (apparently) re-emerge as a huge, glowing-red-eyed, Sasquatch-like being that ran to a nearby woods! That witness also reported a time gap of nearly two hours during the event, while Nelson wasn’t aware of missing any time.

The annals of UFO lore are rife with descriptions of small, slim aliens in body suits of different colors, but these two incidents with their respective connections to Sasquatch and Christmas set them apart in a scary, yet almost charming way.

Muscoda, however, has also been the site of at least one reported cryptid sighting—albeit over 60 years before Nelson’s drop-in guest. In 1941, two young men driving just north of the town had to brake to avoid a dark-furred, furry creature standing upright in the middle of the road. By the time they managed to stop the truck, the beast was right next to their window, well lit by a bright moon. It stood about five-and-one-half feet tall, and was not a bear, cow, deer or any other animal either man could identify. The story was told to me by the daughter of one of the witnesses, who said he spoke of it often over the rest of his life, describing it as “creepy.” (“Hunting the American Werewolf”)

UFOs, body-suited beings and furred, bipedal creatures. Not so different than a flying sleigh, a white-haired man in a red suit and big black boots, accompanied by a slew of prancing, magical beasts with glowing red noses instead of eyes. And there it is: another example of the weird similarities between folklore and contemporary eyewitness reports as so many researchers have pointed out. A Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

One question I hear a lot from radio callers, blog readers and conference attendees is whether I think that unknown, upright canine creatures are related to UFOs. It’s actually a concept that’s been around for some time and is also asked in regard to Bigfoot and other cryptids. My usual answer is that while I don’t have any reports from witnesses who’ve seen a dogman hopping directly off a UFO (although I know there are a few cases where people have claimed this about Bigfoot), it just so happens that places where mystery creatures abound are also often UFO hotspots.

A perfect example of this type of area is the northern unit of the Kettle Moraine State Forest which stretches through Sheboygan, Fond du Lac and Washington Counties in Wisconsin. This wooded, well-watered and hilly terrain encompasses the Holy Hill region which has had numerous sightings of upright, wolf-like creatures — probably the most famous of which was the 2006 incident where the DNR’s carcass removal contractor saw one such beast drag a fresh deer from the back of his pickup truck. It’s also an area where many Bigfoot have been spotted, and includes old legends of a Goatman and ancient sacred places to boot.

It’s just as well known for its UFO activity. The city of Hartford, in fact, was named the site of one of the Top 10 UFO Cases of 2012 by the Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. The incident occurred July 13 when a woman in her 50s and her daughter both saw a silent, lampshade-shaped object equipped with lights and measuring about two hundred feet long zip over the trees in their yard before shooting away in classic UFO style. The sighting lasted about half a minute, which is actually longer than most sightings of unknown phenomena.

The little town of Dundee, one of Wisconsin’s three self-proclaimed UFO capitals (the others are Elmwood and Belleville), has a long history of unidentified flying objects in its skies. A woman I met at a library signing told me of one that she’d had just off Hwy. 67, about ten miles south of Plymouth, on her family farm at the age of ten in November, 1967. She had been sent to fetch some chickens, whose wings hadn’t been sufficiently clipped, from a tree. She was busy pulling them out when she saw a large, silent, cigar-shaped craft hovering just above a nearby tree only forty feet away. It had small portholes or windows, and on one end were two curved, pipe-like appendages that emitted yellow and blue, laser-like lights that appeared to float off on their own. It eventually zoomed off but the girl had quite a long look at it. She didn’t know if the craft’s occupants were aware of her. She also had an aunt who saw a round, disk-like craft over her fishing boat in the same general area.

Cheeseheads aren’t the only ones to see such things. The late Fortean investigator John Keel, best known for his in-depth investigation of, West Virginia’s Mothman of Point Pleasant, said in an interview for the Sept., 2007 issue of FATE Magazine that there were “countless” sightings of UFOs in that vicinity in the mid-1960s, and described seeing many unidentifiable lights himself when he inspected animal mutilations that were also associated with the strange goings-on. The part of the interview that grabbed my attention, however, was his statement that, “Mothman left tracks that looked like giant dog prints.”

That has pretty interesting implications, if true. I’ve never received a report of a dogman with wings, although plenty of people have claimed to have seen flying things with hairy, un-bird-like bodies. But it hints at some sort of Protean, multi-formed entity able to look like several different animals or a blend of them, with some connection to weirdly behaving lights. And yet, most dogman and Bigfoot witnesses believe they have encountered solid, flesh-and-blood creatures. Keel also thought the lights he saw in Pt. Pleasant were “mischievous masses of energy,” but the two witnesses mentioned above who saw UFOs in or near the weird-creature-infested Kettle Moraine both described craft-like forms with defined shapes. Perhaps they were entirely different phenomena – who can really say?

I have to confess that I’ve been working on a case for several months that involves large, bipedal canine prints that do such inexplicable things as appear suddenly in the middle of a secluded field, then track into nearby woods. They seem to belong to some large animal that is somehow able to obscure its image from multiple trail cams as it drags or carries off deer carcasses. The trail cams have caught weird, anomalous lights overhead when these things occur – all of it so far unexplainable. The investigation is still in active progress but I’ll admit it has me questioning some of my own biases at this point.

Still, even that case isn’t solid proof of a relationship between the unknown creatures and mysterious lights or sky vessels, to my mind. But I do believe that the fact that they often appear in the same areas and sometimes the same time frames, too, means that any open-minded investigator ought to take a serious look. Our universe is seldom simple or predictable, and perhaps there’s an unimagined answer out there that no one’s thought of. Yet. I think we’d best keep looking for it.

The topic of UFOs is one that has fascinated me long before I heard of contemporary werewolf-like creatures. Two new books by my author friends Brad Steiger and Nick Redfern have reminded me just why I find aliens and Men in Black such compelling mind fodder.

Author Brad Steiger, or as I liked to call him, Mr. Thoroughness, never writes anything half way. This trait has endeared him to many of us who love to see as much as possible on any given topic in a book, and Real Aliens, Space Beings and Creatures from Other Worlds does not disappoint in its coverage of otherworldly entities.

Co-authored with Sherry Steiger, this 354-page tome takes readers on a meet-and-greet with intergalactic (or home-grown!) visitors of every type and description. There are the Blonde Nordics that look like us, the Reptilians that look like big lizards, and the robots that look like all sorts of things. There are creatures that want to probe us, some that seek to enlighten us and others that appear to view us as breeding stock. All of this unwanted attention begs the question: why are they so interested in humanity? The remainder of the book explores the unsettling possibilities.

Although the Steigers provide plenty of firsthand accounts of encounters with UFOs, abductions and other human-alien interactions, I like the chapters that interface with little-known historical details best. My favorite is titled Nazis and theAldebaran Aliens. It illustrates the amazing lengths – including outer space — der Fuhrer and his Nazi minions would go to in their quest for world domination. As it turns out, Hitler not only believed in aliens but coveted alien propulsion systems to the point of obsession. According to the Steigers’ research, part of Hitler’s plan involved highly trained psychics working in secret societies. The psychics said they received plans from aliens to make saucer-type vehicles that some say actually worked until rival aliens stopped them. The very complex story left me wondering how much we really know about our own history.

In the final chapters, the Steigers examine the true nature of these visitors, and suggest that far from being new arrivals, these so-called aliens may always have been with us. The Steigers also recommend that until the true nature of “grays,” “Nordics” and other non-Terrans is known for sure, we not invite personal experiences with them. I think that is probably wise.

The book includes a bibliography and comprehensive index, which makes it not only a compelling read but a valuable research resource. I give Real Aliens, Space Beings and Creatures from Other Worlds two opposable digits and three antennae up!

Men in black, mysterious figures in black suits that pop up at UFO sighting scenes like mushrooms after a spring rain, have become so solidly entrenched in pop culture that very popular – and imaginative – movies have been made about them. Nick Redfern’s new book tracks their history from the days when MIB were esoteric lore known only to UFO geeks, to today’s guys with cool shades who show up on your local theater screen. The real Men in Black are far more sinister than I had guessed.

The book was especially persuasive to me personally since it includes the experiences of colleagues I’ve come to know and trust over the years including Brad Steiger, Marie D. Jones and Raven Meindel. The terror they and many others experienced was subtle – compared to sightings of, say, Bigfoot or werewolves — yet very traumatic.

Sporting black suits and hats some have compared to those of the Blues Brothers, Men in Black started showing their pale and unexpressive faces in the middle of the 20th Century, around the same time flying saucers entered the public consciousness. Witnesses and researchers of the UFO phenomenon found themselves threatened and harassed – often in unexplainable ways – by the lurking strangers who usually drove shiny black cars. Scarily, MIB continue these terror tactics to present day, sometimes updating their transportation to black helicopters or other vehicles.

In my book, Strange Wisconsin, I reported an incident told me by a farmer in western Wisconsin who was deer hunting with his children when the three saw a UFO rise from a nearby tree top and then shoot off over a field. They were so terrified they decided to forget hunting and just leave, but as they exited the woods they saw a convoy of shiny black pickup trucks heading single file across the field in the same direction the UFO had gone. Just the sight of so many new trucks in the sleepy area was strange enough, but where did they suddenly come from and why would they all take off across someone’s field in mid-November? What was their connection to the silver, discoid craft and how did they know it was there?

Readers will discover similar weird anomalies in every tale in Redfern’s book. And after grounding readers in many frightening examples of the MIB mystery, Redfern spends the second half of the book wrestling with possible explanations for the creepy figures. Redfern notes that strange people clad in black have appeared to those dabbling in occult studies and practices throughout history. If this is true, perhaps the MIB are not connected to aliens from space at all. Redfern explores such disparate possible origins for them as elaborate thought- forms created by human imagination, time cops from far in the future and perfectly human secret agents.

Author and MIB researcher Colin Bennett is quoted extensively in the book, and he comes to the conclusion that the MIB entities appear to “eat” human energy generated by the fear they provoke. This was interesting to me because I have often said the same thing about the unknown, upright canines I have studied and written about for the past 19 years. Are strange creatures, MIB, UFOs and other scary phenomena part of some massive, unknown entity that exists just one step above us on the psychic food chain? Perhaps unreality bites.

Whatever MIB may be, Redfern and the many experts he consults agree they are not desirable company. There is one simple weapon that seems to work against them but I won’t give that away here. I’ll just say that to be forewarned is to be fore-armed, and that you will want to read this book to know what to do before the MIB come calling on you.